This disclosure relates generally to analyzing tracking requests received by an online system from client devices rendering web pages received from a website, and in particular to determining values for attributes describing items displayed on web pages generating tracking requests received by the online system.
Online systems such as social networking systems track user interactions with the online system so that they can provide features and content that is relevant to each user. The online system logs user interactions for analysis. However, online systems also prefer to monitor user interactions with external systems such as third party websites. An online system may not have direct access to logs of the external website. However, a client device can send a tracking request to the online system describing user interactions between the client device and the external website.
An external website provides instructions with the web page that are executed by the client device when the client device renders the web page. These instructions cause the tracking request to be generated for sending information to the online system. However, sometimes tracking requests received from client devices have missing parameters describing attributes of a particular item for which a user search or viewed within the external website. For example, the instructions processed by the client devices may fail to provide certain details describing an item, such as a product or a service, presented to a user on a web page of an external website. As a result, any analysis performed by the online system based on such missing attributes received from client devices is incomplete and results in the online system making incorrect inferences regarding content distributed to users by the online system. These incorrect inferences may cause the online system to take wrong actions, for example, sending irrelevant content to a user.